Academic Journals Open to Change

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Academic Journals Open to Change

Seven years ago, Michael Eisen, an assistant professor of genetics and development at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, proposed a program to link experimental data from his lab to relevant pieces of scientific literature.

At the time, it seemed a no-brainer. Most scientific journals had begun publishing online, and Eisen believed a system to connect raw data to existing research might produce a multiplier effect. Scientists have always built on the work of other scientists, and he knew that the internet could have a profound impact on the pace of scientific discovery.

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He and his postdoctoral adviser, Pat Brown, fully expected cooperation from Stanford Library, which hosts a large number of scientific journals. "Instead," Eisen recalled, "we were told that the articles we wanted belonged to the publishers and we should basically piss off."

It had never occurred to Eisen that publishers could own scientific literature. He was offended by the idea that scientists could be wronged by copyright. This went double for the public, whose tax dollars pay for much of the scientific research undertaken today.

"All of a sudden, I saw how ridiculous this system was in the internet age," he said, "and I've been working to change it ever since."

In October 2000, Eisen, Brown and Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, co-founded the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making scientific and medical research available online, free from government or corporate control. Two years later they received $9 million to create a nonprofit scientific publishing venture.

So far, PLoS has launched two online science journals – PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine – with plans for three more in the coming months, covering genetics, pathogens and computational biology.

All of them are run by experts in their fields and require rigorous peer review, just like any other respectable academic journal. There are a few key differences, though. PLoS journals are free and allow authors to retain their copyrights, as long as they allow their work to be freely shared and distributed (with full credit given, naturally). They also require that authors pay $1,500 from their grants, or directly from their sponsors or institutions, to have their work published. These groups pay the bulk of the $10 billion that goes to scientific and medical publishers each year, and what do they get in return? Limited access to the research they funded, and no right to reuse the information.

"It's ridiculous to give publishers complete control of an invaluable resource that they had an extremely limited role in creating," Eisen said.

The initial success of PLoS' journals has propelled Eisen to the forefront of a small but growing movement of intellectuals trying to smash the monopoly on scientific research held by a handful of powerful publishers like Reed Elsevier. Elsevier, which is widely viewed as the Microsoft of academic publishing, distributes more than 20,000 science and technical journals, books, reference works and databases, while providing access to 6 million research articles – many of them at a hefty price tag (sometimes more than $1,000 a year per journal).

PLoS isn't the only entity pushing for open access. BioMed Central publishes about 100 journals that are free to the public, and the NIH announced earlier this year it expects all grantees to submit articles arising from NIH-funded research to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed, a free online database.

Being a professor myself, I know that for anyone going up for tenure, it matters a great deal where you publish. One article in Nature, Science or Cell is worth 10 articles in a lesser-known journal. How can PLoS overcome this?

"The prestige of a journal is a function of authors' decisions to send in their best work and the journal's editorial policies," Eisen insisted. "It has nothing to do with how the journal funds its operations."

One bane of an academic author's life can be blind peer review. There are times that those entrusted with reviewing an academic paper have axes to grind or built-in biases. This is not to say that the process is rife with unfairness, but it does happen, as almost anyone who has gone through the process can attest.

PLoS plans to experiment in some of its journals with fully open peer review (where the reviews are signed and made public). In my opinion, however, open-access journals should take it a step further and take a page out of open source: Publish papers in a separate section so that they could be reviewed by whomever wanted to. It would attract the largest audience possible.

Not so fast, Eisen says. "This is an appealing idea – one that I think has a lot of potential benefits. However, I don't think the community is ready to abandon the traditional peer-review process right now for something that is new and not established."